Monday, 18 March 2013

I Keep Dreaming About This

I have a recurring dream where I visit the Glitch site and mysteriously (tantalizingly) there is a button that says "Enter World." The button has no explanation or fanfare. There are no posts explaining what is going on. So I click it and see where it takes me.

Each time Humbabella finds herself somewhere new. Sometimes there are the familiar inhabitants of Ur - piggies, rocks, trees - and sometimes it is something completely different. Once the Scion of Purple greeted me at an endless tower stretching into a fictional sky. Once I was in a desolate northern region like those adjacent to the ancestral lands with no features or Glitchen to be found.

A few times someone else has been online to greet me. I've asked them what is going on. Explanations vary. Sometimes they don't know what is going on either. Sometimes they tell me that the game has come back up but only for a small number of players, that I have to keep it a secret.

I miss watching Humbabella walk around Ur. I've started to work on little animated .gifs so that I can watch her walk and jump and nod off to sleep again. But more than that I miss not being alone. I'm not really alone, not in real life.

If life were as it is presented in news articles, we would think of someone as lonely if all of their friends were online, and they had no one in real life. But there is a part of me that only exists through my connection to the internet, and to people I don't know.

I miss the small pleasure of fictional daily chores, and I miss you, strangers.

About Me

Everything all together makes some sense to me, but it is very hard to communicate that sense by talking about any individual thing. At least I think that to myself. Most of the time I assume that people impart familiar meanings to the words I use and that the real message I wanted to convey is hopelessly lost. It is my fault for choosing prose rather than poetry or direct brain link-ups to explain myself.